May you never be content.
May you embrace the spirit of the chase.
May you always be improving on your character.
May you be content with forever journeying.
May you always progress.
It is in accepting the eternity of growth, improvement, and progression that we surrender the need to be perfect, and that we gain joy in achieving each new portion of it.
If you can clean up your house, you can clean up your bad habits and build good ones instead.
If you can build good habits, you can build new friendships and cure your loneliness.
If you can cure your loneliness, you can cure your boredom and find something good to do.
If you can find something good to do, you can find something good to help others.
If you can help others, you can help your home have more peace and bring order to it.
If you can bring order to your home, you can bring order to your mind and calm it down.
If you can calm your mind down, you can calm your lusts and free your spirit.
If you can free your spirit, you can free the downtrodden and given them hope.
If you can give hope, you can give attention to what really matters.
If you can give attention to what really matters, you can give attention to God and praise Him.
If you can praise God, you can praise what is good in you and let Him purify your soul.
If you can let Him purify your soul, you can let Him purify your family and clean up your house.
If you can change but one, you can change them all.
There are things that I know are right to do, but which I do not feel like doing right now.
But when I examine myself, I realize that I will never feel like doing them.
And if that is the case, then they can only ever be done when I do not feel like doing them.
And then, I know that I must do it now.
When you do what is right and suffer for it, what follows will reveal the purity of your motivations. Either you will feel regret, and know that you are only a fair-weather disciple, or you will feel conviction, and know that your commitment is true. Without being tried like this, your sincerity is only theoretical.
Sometimes, it isn’t the greatness of the task that you do
It’s the greatness of the opposition you overcame to do it
In yesterday’s post we gave both an acknowledgement and a question. Yes, Jesus does love you, but how do you love him back? Can someone say that they genuinely care for their Savior while shamelessly performing the very sins that make him suffer to death? Surely, genuine love for the Lord must look different.
The scriptures detail exactly what genuine love would look like. Jesus, himself, said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” (John 14:15).
We also learned yesterday the importance of knowing Jesus. There, too, the scriptures tell us how to do so.
“And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments,” (1 John 2:3).
“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him,” (1 John 3:6).
The message of the scriptures is clear. If we want to do our part to gain salvation, we must love and know the savior, and the means and the fruit by which we come to love and know the savior is by keeping his commandments.
There is an important distinction that we must make here, though. We are not saying, “keep the commandments to make it into heaven,” or “do enough good works that you deserve to be saved.” Those sorts of messages make people overwhelmed and uncomfortable, and well they should, because they stray from the true theology.
When we focus primarily on the works, we stop being motivated by love, which is supposed to be the core of our behavior. It is entirely possible to do good works without love, and those offerings are not acceptable to the Lord, as Cain famously learned.
We should always frame our obedience to the commandments as a natural extension of our love of him. We should say, “he loved me first, and he died for me, and me following his word is just the way that I love him back.” Any time we feel that our works are being driven by a different motivation, such as fear, we need to recenter ourselves on love.
The day we’re not scared of the changes we’re making
Is the day we’re not really trying
If you lack anything that you love more than yourself
Then you lack any reason to reject your most selfish desires
I’ve spent several days discussing why we should not deceive others, even when we say we are doing it for their own good. After yesterday’s post I thought I was finished with the matter, but some more thoughts have occurred to me that I would like to get down. Today I want to call out how improbable it is that our lies can be harmless in the long run, and tomorrow I will look at the matter from a more global scale.
When we lie, we concoct a world that is in some way different from the real one. Most of us think we will get away with a “little, white lie” because we think we are concocting a world that is virtually indistinguishable from the real one. We believe that the person we deceive will still continue along the general path of reality, just with an imperceptible tint slightly coloring their view.
But that is a supremely arrogant assumption. If telling such a lie were even possible, it could only be done by having a perfect understanding of our subject and their context in life. We would have to know what they already know and believe so that our lie would not have any unintended side effects. For example, if our lie was about another person, we would want to know what our subject already thought and felt about that person in great detail, so that our deceit wouldn’t warp the relationship in any way.
We would also require a comprehensive view of our subject’s situation in life to know if our lie, seemingly harmless by itself, might unravel in terrible ways when combined with other factors. Not only this, but we would also need to be prophetic, anticipating all future states that our subject would be in, so that our lie would not become harmful in future situations.
And finally, if this is to be at all moral, we must also know that our subject, if made aware of this intended deception, would willingly choose to have it administered to them. Obviously we cannot ask them that, but we have to somehow know for certain that this is what they would choose. For even if you did believe that it was genuinely good for this person to be deceived, everyone should still have the right to embrace hard truths if that is what they choose.
Of course, none of us know all of these things when we set out to deceive another. As such, we are not at all sure whether telling them this lie is good for them or not. If we could be honest about our deceit, we would admit that it really isn’t about doing what is best for them at all. It is about what is doing what is best for ourselves. We are trying to moderate and manage another person’s experiences in a way that is more pleasant for us to deal with. It is, put simply, entirely selfish.
When we tell another person a lie, what we are really doing is gambling with their safety and their happiness. We are putting their heart on the line, rolling the dice, and hoping for our desired outcome. We hope that we won’t hurt the other person, we tell ourselves that that won’t happen, but we create the very real possibility that it might happen. That is our exposure, that is what is on the table to lose, and we are deliberately making a decision to accept that. And what’s more, with every lie we are stacking the odds higher and higher against the person’s happiness, but most of us still continue rolling the dice for as long as we possibly can.
Gambling with just money is morally questionable enough, certainly there can never be any justification for doing so with another person’s heart. No matter what sort of justification you might have for your lie, it should be abundantly clear that it is still immoral. Even if the odds of success were far in our favor, it would still be fundamentally immoral.
As I’ve explained above, we have nowhere near the perspective or the intelligence for even half decent odds of success. It’s impossible to know what the chances really are, but in my experience, virtually every lie gets undone eventually. The house always wins sooner or later, but we’re stupid and arrogant enough to think that we’re the ones in charge. We are totally, unjustifiably confident, and so much so that we’re betting with the most valuable commodity that we can. Is there any more obvious a recipe for failure?
29 And Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his clothes. 30 And he returned unto his brethren, and said, The child is not; and I, whither shall I go? 31 And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood;
Reuben’s language to his brothers is very interesting here. It is as if he thinks he is giving them new news. “The child is not!” Does this mean they did not tell him what they had done with Joseph? Was he left to assume that some unknown mischief had taken his brother? Did he never know that his brother had been sent away to Egypt until they met him years later?
I also find interesting his other statement “and I, whither shall I go?” Joseph was the one who had been sold, but Reuben feels lost in this moment as well. As the eldest of all the brethren he might have felt a special responsibility for all of the others, even Joseph. Now that he had failed in that responsibility he had a sense of having misplaced his own self.
And yet, Reuben wasn’t ready to come clean to his father. Rather than tell the man what they had done, Reuben went along with concocting a falsehood about some wild beast killing Joseph. All the brothers had some humbling to go through before they would be ready to own their wrongs.
Spiritual Wanderings 